Religious Bias Against Women

Do to the conflicy in Iraq, there has been alot more coverage and attention given to the treatment of women in Fundementalist Islam. I was thinking about this issue while drive to work today, after hearing a story on NPR about a female German lawyer who's life was threatened for defending other Turkish Women. Usually, in such stories there is always some disclaimer that moderate Islam is against this kind of abuse agaist women; however, I was still left wondering if the problem is a whole lot deeper than people are really considering...

After all, when God is assigned a masculine gender then it automatically sets up a bias against women. It isn't really enough to have an absense of support for violence against women in a religious text. For that matter, ideally the rights and equality of women should be explicitly affirmed in religious texts. When we have to read those values into a text as an assumed principle, then it paved the way for fundementalists to draw their own conclusions.

This is not a problem unique to Islam either. In the United States, there are many conservative denominations, including the Southern Baptists, which prohibit women from taking significant roles of responsibility or leadership in the Church. Among many fundementalist evangelicals, when you hear the term "Family Values", one significant part of that is the idea that men are the head of the household and have absolute authority. At least one Church in Charlottesville that I know about even considers it a sin for a woman to divorce her husband if he is abusive. Even worse, because of this firmly entrenched patriarchy from Abrahamic faiths it's almost assumed that this is universal somehow, and thus tollerated.

Ironically, even though a large number of Americans are of Northern European descent, there is very little knowledge about our own historical cultural and religious traditions regarding women. Among the Celts, there is lots of historical evidence that women were not only given equal priviledges as men, but even revered. They were reportedly allowed to hold any position of power that a man could, provided they had the abilities to do the job. In a time where the weapons of choice were made of iron, women faught in battle alongside men. A great historical example of this is the warrior queen Boudica, who led a revolt against the Romans and burnt ancient London to the ground. Compare this with our continued reluctance to allow women into the infantry, even though it takes far less strength to wield modern weapons.

For the Celts, they didn't need to make religious assumptions about the natural role of women, since their faith explicitly upheld the idea of powerful women. The Goddess Brigid, cannonized as the patron saint of Ireland, embodied this principle. She was known as a goddess of Smithcraft and Poetry. Think about the muscle required to be an iron smith, and how that even challenges our modern concepts of the feminine. That said, she wasn't an ignorant brute either, but a poet too, which implies someone who is highly educated. Consider how long it was until women could even enter American colleges and you have an idea of just how progressive this idea really is.

To be fair, there are progressive branches of Abrahamic religions that are more willling to address the divine feminine, especially after the Da Vinci Code brought attention to the issue. Some have interpreted the Holy Spirit as the feminine principle in the bible to match the Holy Father. Also, more importance is being given to earlier apocryphal texts which accord greater esteem to Mary as a disciple. Nonetheless, I feel fortunate to ascribe to a faith which doesn't need a team of academic scholars to justify the rights of women.

Among NeoPagans, women have always been explicitly been considered the physical and spiritual equal of men. In Charlottesville, this was perhaps first acknowledged by Gleb Botkin, the founder of the Church of Aphrodite, who actually felt women were spiritually somewhat superior to men. It is precisely this long history that leads me to believe that our faith has a unique role in challenging fundamentalists, and all religion, to uphold the inherent rights and value of all people.